Photo: Just before getting on the plane, with Steph looking as stylish as ever.

After nearly 50 hours of travelling I finally made it to Sofia to meet up with the Norwegians. Some slight confusion about when they were arriving but I spotted a Bulgarian wearing a Halden SK jacket who GPS units to give to the Norwegians and we managed to find them together. We are using these GPS units for each training which is useful for analysing how we ran, but also means the coaches can watch us live out at the forest. Good for discussing what happened right afterwards and also finding those runners who are completely lost.

Yesterday we trained on a middle distance map with a slow terrain-familiarisation exercise. The terrain was pretty awesome but the mapping of it was really quite bad. Watching the GPS tracking of the training should give you an idea of how far out some of the tracks were. The GPS tracking can be seen here, We start running at about 16:08: https://events.loggator.com/093idbwRgITSs6yH

Nice terrain!

Also some not so nice. Shotgun starting last.

This morning we had a long distance training. A roughly 10 km course but the terrain is fairly flat and it was all over too soon. The forest has quite poor visibility and combined with the flat, featureless terrain many of the legs were very vague and quite difficult. As the Norwegians here like to say, the key to running well is to “kiss the compass”. This afternoon we will run another slower training, on a middle/relay style map, before a proper long distance race tomorrow.